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The World Bank, an international financial institution with a mission of bringing people out of poverty, took an unprecedented step last week when it released an unflinching report about the destruction soon to be wrought by climate change. The report, “Turn Down the Heat,” painted a picture of a world scalded by a 4 degrees C temperature rise. It was hailed as a crucial step in aligning climate change action with worldwide business and development interests. After all, no one would call the World Bank a bastion of treehugging hippies — if it is urging action, perhaps even the reticent rich will start to listen?

Fast-forward one measly day: The nonprofit World Resources Institute released a completely unrelated working paper [PDF] highlighting just how far the world is from abandoning our favorite fossil fuels, and avoiding the 4-degree hellscape the World Bank envisions. There are currently 1,199 coal-fired power plants under proposal around the world, according to the group. The bulk of them (76 percent, to be exact) are in China and India.

The timing of these two reports seems serendipitous at first: An esteemed and central member of the world’s financial elite shouts “fire!” from a rooftop, followed immediately by the revelation that this terrifying conflagration is almost certainly on its way if we continue to burn coal along our current trajectory. The problem, though, can be found on page 19, table IV, of the WRI report on coal plants: The second-largest public international financier of coal-fired power plants around the world is — you guessed it, the World Bank Group.

According to WRI, the World Bank is currently funding 29 coal plants, to the tune of a cool $5.3 billion. Only the Japan Bank for International Cooperation is spending more, at over $8 billion. The right hand (“Holy shit, stop emitting carbon dioxide and heating up the planet!”) apparently does not know what the left (“Here’s $5 billion, go burn some dead dinosaurs!”) is doing.

It is as infuriating as it is familiar. A growing number of staid and heady financial institutions trumpet climate change risks to the public (e.g., reinsurance giant Munich Re’s recent warning) and yet the money continues to flow to coal plants, to tar-sands projects and pipelines, to Arctic oil exploration.

The easy explanation is that it is simply a matter of short-term greed (and need, in the case of bringing electricity to those who don’t have it) winning out over long-term caution. But the World Bank’s example is hard to fathom. The institution’s president, Jim Yong Kim, began his introduction to “Turn Down the Heat” with the following: “It is my hope that this report shocks us into action.”

Is that meant for all of us, or is it more of a royal “us”? Did he really mean, you know, his own bank? Because it appears to be in need of a good shocking itself.

In recent years, the World Bank has come under fire for some of its coal plant backing, most notably the immense, 4,800-megawatt Medupi power station in South Africa. That loan alone was for $3.75 billion, approved in April 2010. The project lasts until 2015, according to the World Bank’s website. Eighteen months after approval, an internal review found that the bank failed to follow some of its own environmentally related policies in green-lighting the loan.

In early 2011, the World Bank began considering changing its rules regarding coal plant lending. The changes would have basically restricted funding only to the poorest countries, leaving places like Vietnam, India, and South Africa off the list. “It was quite forward-leaning,” says Justin Guay, a Washington representative in the Sierra Club’s international program. “It was a strong referendum on the fact that coal is not a fuel source that belongs in the 21st century.”

Unfortunately, the plan fizzled in the face of opposition from China and India (countries, which, oddly enough, don’t really need World Bank funding to build coal plants). The bank is now stuck with an energy policy written more than a decade ago.

Why does this matter, given that the Bank’s dollars don’t measure up to other sources of fossil fuel funding (like, say, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which sends billions to fossil fuel projects every year)? “What the World Bank says about coal is hugely influential at national levels as well as at other financial institutions,” Guay says. World Bank leaders tend to cycle in and out of governments and other high-level financial institutions, and the Bank carries influence that outweighs its cash. “If the World Bank says we will no longer fund coal, it is not something that should be funded by development institutions, it would have a huge impact in the international financial world.”

With climate talks in Doha now underway, the fundamental issue of climate action will again be back on the table: How do we help the poorest people improve their lives while keeping our emissions from spiraling out of control? (Well, more out of control.) The World Bank president writes in the new report that his institution is “a leading advocate for ambitious action on climate change, not only because it is a moral imperative, but because it makes good economic sense.”

Then how to justify the continued support of coal? The only comment forthcoming (in spite of repeated requests) from the World Bank was from a press call when the climate change report was released. Kim said that the Bank does “everything we can not to invest in coal — everything we possibly can,” but added that sometimes it can still be the only option. Rachel Kyte, the vice president of sustainable development at the Bank, did write last week that the “Turn Down the Heat” report will force a “hard look at our work,” but it is unclear exactly what that means. No major policy shift has been proposed, and with the world glumly staring down a “baby steps” approach in Doha it seems unlikely that a World Bank delegation will shock COP18 into action.

As many others have said, this shouldn’t be an either-or: Action on climate change is a money maker over the long run, without question. And even within the World Bank’s specific purview — poverty reduction — the math seems clear. The Bank’s report lays bare some of the worst results of 4 degrees of warming, and points out that many of them disproportionately target the world’s poorest people. Yes, more than a billion people still lack electricity, but building 1,200 coal plants is not going to help those people in the long run, or even the relatively short run.

If they want to shock us into action, a good start might be to cut out coal plant funding entirely; we appreciate the reports, but cash is a much better motivator. When the biggest financial institutions in the world start putting their money where their heated, impassioned rhetoric is, then we’ll be getting somewhere.

Filed under: Business & Technology, Climate & Energy

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It’s something of a miracle that Craig Childs wasn’t in Atlantic City or New York when Sandy roared ashore earlier this week. It’s not that he lives there — he and his wife and two young sons make their home at the base of a volcanic monolith in the Colorado boondocks. It’s not even that the author and adventurer spends a good part of his time actively courting cataclysm — his latest book, Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth took him to areas of upheaval (geologic and otherwise) around the globe. It’s just that he has a way of showing up, serendipitously, right when everything goes to hell.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Childs, who has written almost a dozen books about the desert Southwest, archaeology, and wild animals, was in lower Manhattan, on his way to meet literary agents. “I was walking crosstown so I didn’t see what was going on, but there were emergency vehicles streaming down Fifth Avenue, and I could see people coming out of the subway station and popping up to the surface and being riveted by something overhead,” he says. “I came around the corner right after the second plane had hit, and pretty much just stayed down there until the first tower fell.”

Apocalyptic Planet opens with a scene of Childs, passed out in a friend’s L.A. apartment after a trip in the wilderness, awakened by an earthquake that rattles the walls and hurls books from the shelves. “In those moments, my picture of the earth was remade,” he writes. “The floor felt as if foot pedals were pumping beneath me, a continental margin humped up on he back of a tectonic pate. Humans may have a big hand in carpeting the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases and dumping every toxin we can imagine into the waterways, but when the earth decides to roll, it is no longer our game.”

Nor is it our game when the earth decides to whip up a megastorm and hurl it at the Eastern Seaboard — though we likely had a hand in creating that monster. Or when it decides to reclaim farmland and cities with desert and sand dunes, or obliterate entire landscapes with tsunamis or volcanic ash — all scenarios that Childs explores in Apocalyptic Planet.

Sound scary? This week, I caught up with Childs, who I’ve known for a decade or so, to talk about Hurricane Sandy, our cultural obsession with the End Times, and why he thinks “things are not as dire as we think — but they could be much more dire than we imagine.”

Q. Where were you when Sandy made landfall?

A. I don’t know where I was. I guess I was driving back to Colorado from the West Coast, crossing through Nevada, where everything was clear and beautiful in the desert, thinking, “What? Hurricane? Who? New York? Where’s New York?” How’d I miss that?

Q. When something like 9/11 or Hurricane Sandy takes out New York City, it comes as such a shock. New York seems so powerful.

A. And permanent. Changeless. It is such a created landscape that you think that humans are dominating. And for the most part, we do dominate there. We have fabricated these wonderful systems that keep things level for us, but even on small scales, even when it just rains, it gets our attention, much less when something big like Sandy happens.

Q. Your new book is a big old reminder that Mother Nature is out there kicking ass and could arrive at our doorsteps any day.

A. Yeah, and that it’s always there, it’s always pushing and pulling. Even without the specter of anthropogenic climate change and everything that we’re talking about now, this still is a planet that changes dramatically, regionally and globally. This hasn’t taken a hiatus for us. We like to imagine that nothing will change. Everything will change, and it’s becoming more likely as we continue to push on the planet.

Q. Is there something hard-wired into humans that makes us unable to react to these larger forces and long-term changes?

A. I don’t know if it’s even humans. I think it’s just systems. Systems seek an equilibrium, and we seek ours. I think humans are actually really good at adapting and changing. I think we’re one of the most cunning and adaptable species on the planet. But we create a system and try to hold onto our equilibrium, and that equilibrium is business as usual.

I think that given enough time, humans will figure things out. I actually think we’re gonna be around for a really long time. In what form, who knows. What kind of societies — that’s hard to tell. But we know how to survive. A city can be taken down or a civilization can be taken down and we’ll snap to it. We’ll figure out how to keep eating and breathing.

Q. You’ve spent a lot of time writing about the Anasazi, who allegedly vanished from the desert Southwest. Do you think that gives you a different perspective on all this?

A. Yeah, we have this story of annihilation, sudden disappearance, mysterious ending. But whenever you look closer at something, you find, oh, it’s not as black and white as we imagined.

In the Anasazi world a thousand years ago, they had huge droughts that really put them under social stress that led to warfare, massacres, mass migrations. But when you follow them, you find out, oh, they migrated, they went somewhere else, and here’s how they trickled down through the landscape over centuries. And you find that they’re still alive: They’re the Hopi, the Zuni, the Acoma people, the Tewa.

Q. Your book is about the apocalypse — and as children of the Cold War, I think we both grew up with this nagging feeling that everything could come to a screaming halt at any second. But your version of the apocalypse isn’t any more final than the Anasazis’ “disappearance.”

A. We imagine this flash of light and it’s all over. Well, no, it doesn’t happen that way. It happens like Hurricane Sandy happens, where it suddenly spikes and you get a change and then you adapt and you get another one.

The Eastern Seaboard is going to be hit by other major storm surges, maybe not for 20 years, maybe not for 50, maybe not for 100. But if you want a city like New York to continue standing, you need to think about it being hit again and again and again by storms like this. Sea levels are rising, ocean temperatures are warming up, so likelihoods are increasing. And you can just cross your fingers and hope for your own resilience and go, OK, well, we’ll build back whenever it happens and return to normal. Or you could look into storm surge barriers and you could change the way that the city relates to the landscape, relates to the climate.

Q. Which path do you think we’ll take, now that you’ve written this latest book?

A. Well, I had gone into it expecting this to be kind of a dire project, that I was gonna come away from it thinking, “Oh my god, it’s all lost.” But I actually came away from it thinking, no, there’s a lot of good stuff happening, and chances of worst-case scenario are, as usual, slim.

I mean, there were some moments in the thick of the book where I was going through climate research and just going, “Oh no. It really is dire. There is no way out. This planet is going to be a burned-out rock before we know it.” And then I looked at other research that didn’t really contradict what I was reading but just said hey, look over here in this corner. Look at the species resilience in the midst of an extinction. Look at the way that humans adapt, have adapted in the past.

When you’re looking at civilizations in the past that have fallen, you see that, oh, well, some of it has fallen, but other parts are rising. The point of no return doesn’t exist. I mean you never return. You’re always at the point of no return, in a way. But I came away thinking, things are probably gonna work out, but we have to work our asses off in order for that to happen.

Q. In your book, you talk about how you and your wife, Reagan, always had a contingency plan, just in case something really bad went down while you were off traveling and you guys needed to find each other. Do you still do that?

A. Not as much as we used to, but we still think about it a little bit — not because we’re expecting it to happen, but just because it does happen. If something went wrong you’d want to have thought about it beforehand. If we were in a Hurricane Sandy situation, I’m gonna wish I had said before I saw her last: So where do you wanna meet? Where do you wanna leave a message?

Q. Because chances are you’re gonna be right in the middle of it when it arrives.

A. Chances are …

Filed under: Cities, Climate & Energy

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Are you tired of hearing claims that chemical-intensive monocultures are the only way to feed the planet’s growing population? With the first in her series of “mythbusting” videos, Anna Lappé, author of Diet for a Hot Planet and occasional Grist contributor, takes on this point directly. She argues that, in fact, a network of small-scale, independent farms using diversified, sustainable practices and a shift in the way the food we already grow gets eaten will go a long way toward solving the problem without such a heavy reliance on corporate agriculture. Take a look and tell us what you think.

(Did we mention that today is Food Day? Find food-related activities in your area here.)

Learn more about the Food Mythbusters series on its website.

Filed under: Article, Food

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Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus have a real knack for stirring the pot.

In 2004, the duo, founders of an Oakland, Calif.-based think tank called the Breakthrough Institute, published a paper called “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World.” Much to the chagrin of many old-school greens, they argued that the institution of environmentalism was unable to deal with the global crises knocking at our door, because environmentalists were pigeonholed by what they called “the politics of limits” — that is, enviros keep prophesying the End Times, only to be proven publicly and embarrassingly wrong. (Grist ran a whole series about the ensuing melee under the banner “Don’t Fear the Reapers.”)

At the core of the Breakthrough philosophy is the belief that human ingenuity will trump all of the doomsaying, allowing us to survive and adapt to a warmer world. To take a recent example, Breakthrough has been steadfast in critiquing a hypothesis, first proposed in a 2009 Nature article, arguing that there are nine biophysical limits in the Earth’s cycles that, when crossed, lead to irrecoverable harm for humans. From Breakthrough’s perspective, this notion of “planetary boundaries” is misguided. They don’t dispute that this growth will come at a cost to the environment, they just argue that our limits will be self-imposed. We can grow and grow, as long as we don’t care about having tropical forests, polar bears, or coral reefs.

In reading through the Breakthrough literature, it would be easy to characterize Shellenberger, Nordhaus, & Co. as climate skeptics or deniers — they are certainly quick to criticize those who predict imminent disaster. But to do so would be to oversimplify their arguments. Instead, they are trying to put climate change into a broader context — one that includes other challenges such as hunger, poverty, and access to clean energy, as well as a more realistic (in their opinion) sense of our abilities to innovate our way through sticky circumstances.

“Whenever liberals try to make it a life-or-death situation — whether it’s on environmental policy or social policy — it just rings false,” Shellenberger told me in a recent interview, “because it is false.”

This is the allure of the Breakthrough philosophy: Rejecting the apocalyptic narrative so common in environmental circles will, they say, one, allow us to finally gain traction with a public that is tired of all the doom and gloom, and two, clear the way for the innovation we’ll need to thrive in a warming world.

Then again, maybe this is about life or death. Maybe the stakes are higher for the planet than Shellenberger and Nordhaus are willing to admit. Only time will tell. But there is at least one point on which these firebrands and environmentalists can agree: In the new Age of Humans, we have stark choices when it comes to who wins and who loses.

Here’s my interview with Michael Shellenberger, in which he talks about planetary decisions, Malthusian scientists, and the quaint notion that there are limits on human growth.

This interview is part of the Generation Anthropocene project, in which Stanford students partake in an inter-generational dialogue with scholars about living in an age when humans have become a major force shaping our world.

Filed under: Climate & Energy

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Incoming search terms for the article:

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Do you ever wonder how many vendors at your local farmers’ market are really local?

Cameron Reed did. So she mapped them for a school project. As she expected, the vast majority – more than 80 percent – did indeed come from within 100 miles, but Reed was surprised to find that a wide mix of products were grown and produced even closer to home within 50 miles of where she lived.

An updated version of the map Reed made will appear in an upcoming collection called Food: An Atlas, which will chart the world of food in some of its most inspiring and somber dimensions – from food production, distribution, and food security, to cuisine. Like many of those behind the atlas, Reed hopes to inspire people to think more closely about the origins of their food.

“It’s a book about the geography of food,” says Darin Jensen, a University of California at Berkeley professor and cartographer who is spearheading the project. Jensen issued a call for maps in June and the submissions began pouring in. Food: An Atlas is crowdsourced from roughly 100 volunteers spread across parts of the globe, including a loose band of what Jensen calls “guerrilla cartographers.” That means they created maps and contributed to the project voluntarily, not because they are under assignment.

You can also call Jensen a guerrilla publisher. He will take a non-traditional approach and self-publish Food: An Atlas, courtesy of a Kickstarter campaign that ends Tuesday. (As of last week, it had already hit its $20,000 goal, as well as additional $1,500 to create a website for the project and release it as an e-book.)

The $20,000 will be used to print the first 1,100 copies. The balance will go to print additional copies and toward sales and distribution, which will begin in early December.

Some maps, such as one of a tomato tour of Europe, raise interesting questions about global trade. Spain, for example, exports some of its best tomatoes out of the country at a premium, according to author Lucia Argüelles of Barcelona, but it also imports tomatoes for consumption from other nations, such as Morocco and France, or from the Netherlands during the winter. These inefficiencies exacerbate environmental problems, such as climate change and air pollution.

click to embiggen

Several maps look to the past, such as the one that examines how the vast agricultural landscape of Los Angeles County has largely disappeared over the last 70 years. There is also a series of six maps that depict worldwide agricultural land use every 50 years from 1700. Taken together, the maps show an incredible intensification of agriculture in areas such as North America, Russia and Europe.

Even with this huge expansion and intensification of agriculture around the world — in many places we’re pretty close to our agricultural limits — there are still several pristine areas that haven’t been used for farming, says cartographer Bill Rankin, referring to undeveloped regions in the Amazon, Congo and Southeast Asia.

“We already know the rainforests are areas of key concern, but I really think the maps underscore the kinds of pressure they’re facing, and the pressures are agricultural,” says Rankin, a professor of science history at Yale.

Other maps in the collection are downright sobering, such as one that outlines the farmers’ markets in large U.S. metro areas, with an overlay of the number that accept food stamps, which is smaller than what Jensen would like to see.

“There are a lot of farmers’ markets — the Northeast and West Coast have an abundance — but that food is mostly available to people who can pay cash dollars, and farmers’ markets aren’t cheap anymore,” Jensen says.  “We’re withholding accessibility to fresh, often organic produce, from the people who sometimes need it the most.”

There are also maps for children and a chapter focused on conceptual maps. And some maps are designed to bring out your inner food nerd, particularly in the cuisine section. For example, there is Meatpaper magazine’s map that takes you on a journey of the world’s familiar and exotic national dishes, which include Peking duck in China, poutine in Canada, ceviche in Peru, and the hamburger in the U.S.

Another calls out all the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and Community Supported Fishery programs in Massachusetts (i.e. the food delivery programs dedicated to supporting small farms and fishermen).

click to embiggen

And who wouldn’t be interested in a map of the U.S. “beer shed,” which plots the dominant regions for growing the ingredients used to make most beers? If you live in Oakland, a map of the taco trucks in that area would probably come in very handy.

Jensen plans to take Kickstarter donors who have given generously to the project on a tour of those same taco trucks with the core team behind Food: An Atlas. Backers may also receive a copy of the book, other dining rewards, he says, and, of course, the chance “to be counted among the guerrillas.”

Filed under: Food

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Making decisions about how and where to invest limited resources is always difficult, especially with a group of diverse stakeholders. It’s more difficult when, as in the case of infrastructure like bridges, sea walls, and sewer systems, the effects of the decisions can extend out for decades, even centuries. And it’s more difficult still when future conditions are subject to what I discussed in a previous post as “deep uncertainty.”

Deep uncertainty involves two basic conditions. First, the models we use to anticipate future conditions produce a wide range of scenarios of equal (or indeterminate) likelihood. There are, to quote my current favorite World Bank white paper, “multiple possible future worlds without known relative probabilities.” And second, stakeholders have divergent worldviews and irreconcilable differences about what counts as success, or an appropriate level of risk.

As you’ve no doubt noted, that’s the situation we face with climate change. We have to make decisions — political decisions, investment decisions — about things that will last 50, 100, even 200 years. Our models tell us that global ecosystems and climate are likely to change dramatically during that time. But they can not tell us exactly what shape that change will take, especially at the regional and local scale where decisions are typically made. “There is a scale misfit,” say the World Bankers, “between what can be provided by climate models and what is needed by decision-makers.” So we’re stuck planning for a future that is, at best, hazy.

The politicians and other leaders who make (or influence) such decisions do not like deep uncertainty. They do not like it, Sam I Am. They want something specific to plan for. Expert recommendations. Metrics, targets, and “deliverables.” Otherwise there’s no way to determine the most efficient use of resources, how to minimize costs and maximize benefits, which course is optimal. So they ask analysts for cost-benefit analysis (CBA).

CBA is useful in some circumstances, particularly where there are bounded time spans and known risks. But remember, there’s a difference between risk (statistically quantifiable) and uncertainty (not). It is the difference, if you will, between Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns” and his “unknown unknowns.”

As time horizons and uncertainty increase, CBA becomes less and less useful, more and more “a knob-twiddling exercise in optimizing outcomes,” as economist Martin Weitzman put it. Differences in social/political/ethical assumptions, like discount rates, start determining model outcomes. “Results from the CBA,” says the World Bank, are “extremely dependent on parameters on which there is no scientific agreement (e.g., the impact of climate change on hurricanes) or no consensus (e.g., the discount rate).” It’s still possible to construct models and get answers, but the danger becomes higher and higher of getting the wrong answer, i.e., optimizing for the wrong thing.

Consider the case of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, highlighted in the aforementioned white paper:

Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) ranks fourth globally among coastal cities most vulnerable to climate change. HCMC already experiences extensive routine flooding; in the coming decades, increased precipitation and rising sea levels could permanently inundate a large portion of the city, place the poor at particular risk, and threaten new economic development in low-lying areas.

In response to these challenges, HCMC has over the last fifteen years developed plans for, and started implementing, numerous infrastructure projects to mitigate the flood risk. The multi-billion dollar investment plans in sewage and drainage infrastructure included, over the years:

• 6000 km of canals and pipes covering 650 km2 in the city, to upgrade discharge capacity of the storm sewer system and to address land up-filling.
• Roughly 172 km dikes and river barriers, mainly for tidal control.
• A tide control plan that uses at least 12 gates and 170 km of dikes to create a polder system.

These plans were based on the best predictions of future climate and development available to planners at the time.

Can you guess what happens next?

Recent analysis suggests, however, that climate change and urbanization will be larger than anticipated, and some variables are already beyond the maximum that were considered in the design phase. These surprises require significant revisions to the plans. At-risk infrastructure includes:

• The canals and pipes built principally to upgrade discharge capacity of the storm sewer system may not be able to handle increased flows.
• Increases in precipitation and tide levels observed over the last decade already exceed those projected and may over-top dikes and barriers.
• Future saline intrusion and rainfall intensity may be more severe than anticipated, potentially rendering the poldering plans obsolete even before they have been approved.

Since the plan was created, the city has also experienced unprojected urbanization in low-density areas, perhaps due to the illusion of safety associated with the presence of flood prevention infrastructure. The HCMC Steering Committee for Flood Control (SCFC) is concerned the insufficiency of the planned infrastructure may worsen flooding in some areas of HCMC. In this case, the intervention’s legacy will have been an increase in vulnerability. [emphasis in original]

Lesson: If you spend a bunch of money optimizing for the wrong thing, it can be worse than doing nothing.

Now, whenever I criticize cost-benefit analysis, someone will ask, Well, what’s the alternative? What else can you do but weigh costs and benefits? How else would you make decisions?

Funny you should ask! Turns out the World Bank white paper everyone’s* talking about has a great deal to say on that very subject. It describes various alternative decisionmaking procedures and gets into the weeds of some case studies. And if that doesn’t sate your nerd thirst, have no fear, the literature on climate change and uncertainty is extensive. Go nuts.

For the rest of you, though, I just want to focus on the top-line idea. It is this: Shift the focus from optimality to robustness. Rolls right off the tongue, no?

The optimal decision is the one that achieves the best cost-benefit ratio in a given set of conditions. A robust decision can be expected to hold up, and perform reasonably well, under a wide variety of possible conditions. To make the optimal decision, you must be able to quantify risks. When there is uncertainty rather than risk — “multiple possible future worlds without known relative probabilities” — one is better off with robust decisions.

The optimal decision aims for efficiency; the robust decision aims for resilience. A resilient solution may not be — probably won’t be — the one best suited for whatever circumstances do end up coming to pass. But it is, from the present-day perspective, the one most broadly suited to the widest array of possible futures.

An optimal solution is cost-effective, if you get it right (obviously). But strategies aiming for optimality are brittle. If you optimize for one thing and run into another, you risk degradation or collapse (or, like Ho Chi Minh City, just wasting a buttload of money). Robust decisions and investments often cost more in the short- to mid-term; the extra money is effectively spent as insurance against unforeseen outcomes. A robust solution retains its integrity in a wide array of circumstances.

When it comes to climate change, most economic models are premised on CBA — the search for efficiency. The World Bankers suggest an alternative, based on robustness, and yes, it involves yet another acronym: CIDA, or Climate Informed Decision Analysis, also known as “decision scaling.”

“As a process committed to acceptance of deep uncertainties,” they say, “CIDA does not attempt to reduce uncertainties or make predictions, but rather determine which decision options are robust to a variety of plausible futures.”

I will spare you a detailed description of CIDA. (You’re welcome.) The main thing to understand is that the first step is assembling stakeholders and mapping out their concerns — where they are vulnerable, what they can tolerate, what they want to avoid, what they aspire to. That’s your vulnerability analysis and it is entirely separate from the vagaries of climate models. It gives you a set of decisions to analyze.

Then you figure out which decisions are vulnerable to which climate outcomes. Once you have a “map of which decision options are optimal under which groups of climate conditions,” then, and only then, you use statistical techniques (and “expert judgment”) to try to figure out how likely those climate outcomes are. That last step is as much an art as a science.

This gives you, not a single, optimal decision, but a kind of decision matrix that reflects stakeholder concerns and reveals which specific dangers face which specific decisions. It avoids the hubris of pretending to know exactly what will happen in the future. And it’s more transparent and democratic.

If this sounds like more work than just running some model simulations, well, it is. Targeting resilience rather than efficiency requires a more distributed, democratic, and labor-intensive form of decisionmaking.

The white paper describes how Ho Chi Minh City regrouped from its mistakes and implemented a robust decisionmaking process. And it has some other case studies of robust decisionmaking. But I suspect I’ve stretched your patience far enough.

Here’s the thing to remember: Decisionmaking under deep uncertainty means less optimality, more robustness, less efficiency, more resilience. Now go forth and think about how it would work in your own community.

——

* Me.

Filed under: Article, Climate & Energy

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Photo by Solar Mosaic.

In a previous post, I told the story of a discouraging defeat for distributed energy. So I want to follow up to make the point that, despite that one setback, distributed energy is spreading quickly and has enormous potential. (Reminder: Distributed energy is small-scale power sources, usually “behind the meter,” often owned by individuals or companies or community groups instead of utilities, connected by an intelligent grid. Yes, I need a snappier summary.)

One thing that’s frustrated me a little bit about distributed-energy discussions is that, in practice, most of the distributed generation sources in the world are small diesel generators or combined heat and power (CHP) units. Those are interesting in their own right, but what I’m most interested in is distributed renewables.

Luckily, Pike Research has come to my aid with a report on “Renewable Distributed Energy Generation” (RDEG). You can read a short write-up here or a longer executive summary here [PDF], but you’ll need $3,900 (!) to read the full report.

Under the heading of RDEG, the report looks at distributed solar PV, small-scale wind, and stationary fuel cells, though it acknowledges that for the time being, solar PV represents 99 percent of that total. (Fuel cells are big in China, but haven’t taken off elsewhere, and small wind is nascent everywhere.)

There was 20.6 gigawatts of new RDEG installed worldwide in 2011, representing $66.5 billion in revenues. RDEG has been growing at an incredibly speedy rate, but it still represents well under 1 percent of global electricity generating capacity. It’s a tiny, tiny sliver of the big picture for now, though the report says it is “rapidly maturing and expected to play an increasingly important role in meeting the energy challenges of the 21st century,” as evidenced by the fact that it is already cheaper than central generation in several places and circumstances.

So where is all this renewable distributed energy? For now, mostly in Europe:

(Click to embiggen.)

Build-out was especially vigorous in Europe last year because of the impending scale-back in subsidies (feed-in tariffs) in Italy and Germany, which together hosted 58 percent of new build. But Asia Pacific had its first boom year in 2011, especially in China, and Japan and South Korea are expected to take off in coming years. Things are also picking up in North America, thanks to feed-in tariffs in Ontario and the rising popularity of solar leasing in the U.S. (More on that in a later post.)

As for the future, the report notes several positive trends. Awareness of RDEG is growing, prices for PV are dropping, alternative financing techniques are taking off, third-party ownership and community ownership models are taking off, and the developing world is seeing an explosive rise in demand that centralized development can’t keep up with.

So that’s big picture: for now RDEG is a tiny seed, but it has lots of room to grow and, at the moment, plenty of sunlight and water. My bet is that it will outpace most projections, just like, say, cell phones did, and for many of the same reasons.

Filed under: Article, Business & Technology, Climate & Energy

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Photo by Dave Schlabowske.

Last week, while the world’s finest amateur athletes competed in London, hundreds of poorly paid professional athletes from four continents convened in Chicago for the Olympics of bike messengering. They were here for the 20th annual Cycle Messenger World Championships, the ultimate test of two-wheeled delivery prowess.

It was a long, alcohol-fueled week of events celebrating the courier lifestyle, including the main race simulating a day of work in the Chicago Loop business district, on-street “alleycat” races, a courier-themed film night, track competitions, and the Messenger Prom, where cyclists got dolled up in slinky dresses and ironic tuxedos.

Many pundits have predicted that bike couriers would go the way of the Pony Express, rendered obsolete by digital technology. But the crowd of messengers, who came from as far away as Guatemala, Japan, and Australia, proved that, while email and online file sharing have cut into the messenger business since the salad days of the 1990s, as cities grow more congested, there may always be a place for fast, efficient, environmentally friendly bike delivery.

On Sunday, the last day of the “champs,” dozens of couriers gathered in a huge parking lot next to the Soldier Field football stadium to compete in the finals for the main race, with parcels to transport, multiple checkpoints to visit, and plenty of split-second logistical decisions to make. Many rode sleek fixed-gear bikes, and most wore some combination of high-tech bike gear and thrift store threads.

Photo by John Greenfield.

If there was a uniform, it consisted of a cycling cap, cut-off Dickies work pants, and a single-strap bag customized with colorful patches. There was plenty of brightly dyed hair, along with dreadlocks, piercings, and tattoos. One guy with a Fabio-like mane had an angel inked on each bicep, one labeled “Triumph” and the other “Failure.”

I buttonholed a fellow dressed as a giant hotdog, one of the unofficial symbols of this meat-obsessed city. “My favorite thing about the championships is seeing all of my friends from other places, getting drunk, and racing,” he said, introducing himself as S.K., from Minneapolis. “If you’re a bike messenger, sometimes it seems like everyone else in the world is a jerk and other messengers are the only people you want to hang out with.”

S.K. offered to sell me a copy of “The Full Package,” a pin-up calendar featuring male Minneapolis couriers in their skivvies, a fundraiser for the 2014 North American Cycle Courier Champions, to be held in the Twin Cities.

As I walked away from the human frankfurter another courier teased, “Your wiener’s showing.”

At one of the race checkpoints, longtime Chicago messenger John “Blunt” Robbins, sporting turquoise dreads, posed for photos shirtless with his trademark banana-seat bike held over his head. “The people here are all my family,” he said. “We’re all related and we’ve all got the same mother, no matter what race, creed, or color, because as messengers we’ve had the same experiences and the same difficulties.”

Photo by Dave Schlabowske.

These hardships include pedaling hard in heavy traffic in pouring rain, freezing cold, and this summer’s record-setting heat. Broken bones and totaled bikes are common, and many couriers have war stories of near-death experiences. But while the job used to offer relatively good earning potential for “unskilled” labor, with efficient couriers making over $25,000 a year in commissions during the late ’90s, nowadays most messengers make little more than minimum wage, sans benefits.

Yuki Ogawa, from Tokyo, which hosted the world championships in 2009, said the challenges of messengering in her city include hard-to-find addresses, speeding motorcycles, slow-moving housewives on “mamachari” utility bikes, and taxicabs with automatic doors that can suddenly open in a cyclist’s path.

After the finals of the main race, there was a cargo competition, with contestants transporting boxes, bricks, car tires, and wooden pallets via trailers and specialized cargo bikes, or simply stuffing items into their courier bags and carrying them by hand.

The guy in the sausage suit excelled in the sprint competition, and the heat after his featured a racer who streaked in the nude, save for his bike helmet. (Although many couriers opt not to wear head protection at work, helmets were mandatory for the racers.)

Photo by Dave Schlabowske.

The final competition was skids, with contestants on brakeless fixed-gears locking their knees to halt their tires, performing amazing slides on the pavement while leaning over the handlebars at a 45-degree angle to the ground. The longest skid won.

After the races were over, the couriers pedaled to a nearby rock club for live-band karaoke and an awards ceremony. When the final results were tabulated, the overall male and female winners were announced: Craig Etheridge from Seattle and Josephine Reitzel from Lausanne, Switzerland. The scruffy, sweaty, PBR-swilling crowd went wild.

The enthusiasm of the couriers for their job was palpable, but with all the difficulties, dangers, and low pay, why do they still love it? “If you’ve got some alternative ideas about using oil and using cars in the city, being a courier is a great way to do what you’re talking about,” explained Jérôme Demuth from Paris. “You’re outside, you’re getting exercise, it’s a rush — and it’s good fucking work.”

Filed under: Cities

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Pax World Management LLC/Portsmouth, NH

ABOUT PAX WORLD:

Pax World Management LLC, the investment adviser to Pax World Funds, is a recognized leader in Sustainable Investing, the full integration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into investment analysis and decision making. Pax World launched the financial industry’s first socially responsible mutual fund in 1971.

Today, Pax World offers a comprehensive platform of Sustainable Investing solutions including Pax World Funds, a family of no-load mutual funds; ESG Managers® Portfolios, multi-manager asset allocation funds powered by Morningstar Associates; ESG Shares®, the first family of ETFs devoted exclusively to a Sustainable Investing approach; and separately managed accounts for institutional investors.

Pax World is a rapidly growing small company headquartered in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with a friendly, collegial and growth-oriented professional work environment. We are an equal opportunity employer committed to high standards of corporate social responsibility, both in our investment approach and in the way we try to conduct our own business. Women and minority candidates are encouraged to apply for this position.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Reporting into Marketing, this individual will be responsible for maintaining the technical application backend of three websites, all of which use the Webiva (Ruby-on-Rails) platform.
• Ensure error-free maintenance of website data feeds from various financial market sources.
• Provide technical assistance for e-mail marketing campaigns and online advertising campaigns, including customized landing pages.
• Work with internal clients and the Marketing Manager to build and refine graphic designs for websites.
• Must have strong skills in Photoshop, Fireworks, or equivalent application(s).
• Convert raw images and layouts from a graphic designer into CSS/XHTML themes.
• Determine appropriate architecture, and other technical solutions, and make relevant recommendations internally.
• Work closely with Marketing Manager and other members of the Marketing Team to develop detailed specification documents with clear project deliverables and timelines, and ensure timely completion of deliverables.
• Communicate to the Marketing Manager with efficiency and accuracy any progress and/or delays.
• Alert colleagues to emerging technologies or applications and the opportunities to integrate them into operations and activities.
• Be actively involved in and contribute regularly to the development community of the CMS of your choice.
• Maintain project plans and work closely with third party technology provider to insure timely delivery of initiatives.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• BS in computer science or a related field, or significant equivalent experience
• 3 years minimum experience with HTML/XHTML and CSS
• 2 years minimum Web programming experience, including PHP, ASP or JSP
• Significant experience with Ruby-on-Rails and the Webiva platform a plus
• 2 years minimum experience working with relational database systems such as MySQL, MSSQL or Oracle and a good working knowledge of SQL
• Development experience using extensible web authoring tools
• Experience developing and implementing open source software projects
• Ability to organize and manage multiple priorities
• Highly organized manager with proven project management skills working in a high volume environment
• Self-starter who assigns sense of urgency to tasks; able to work independently or in collaboration with other internal/external constituencies
• Positive attitude; team player
• High degree of personal integrity, trustworthiness and ethical standards

COMPENSATION:

Competitive compensation and bonus opportunities commensurate with qualifications and performance

CONTACT INFORMATION:

To apply for this job, please submit your resume and cover letter via e-mail to Janet Lawton Spates, Vice President Administration. Please include “Web Developer†in the email subject line.

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Jennifer Keeler feeding her chicken

Here are a few things you should know about keeping backyard chickens: Poultry are “poop machines” — but cleaning up after them is “less maintenance than a cat’s litter box.” You can let them range free around the yard — just watch out for predatory eagles (and your garden: “Chickens will annihilate it.”). Chickens are “not pets,” except when “they’re very much our pets.” Clearly, fowl guardianship is a highly personal endeavor.

I gleaned these scraps of wisdom last Saturday, when I attended a citywide open house of sorts for backyard chicken enthusiasts. On Seattle Tilth’s annual Chicken Coop & Urban Farm Tour, the keepers of the local flocks open up their coops and let the curious poke around. Of course, I was among them. I’ve been taken with the fantasy of backyard chickens for a while now — waking in the morning to soft bawk-bawk-bawking, whipping up fluffy omelets with just-laid eggs — so I had to see how closely real chicken husbandry matched my daydreams. Is it difficult? Is it stinky? Do I really have what it takes to be a hen mother? It was time to find out.

Unlike in my Midwestern hometown, where my friend must force her four-year-old son into 4-H so she can get an otherwise-verboten chicken permit, Seattle law generously allows for eight chickens per household. “And you don’t need as many as you think you do,” flock-haver Chris Bajuk told me. He gets three eggs a day from his four chickens, which roost in a mobile coop of his own design. When the birds successfully mow a patch of grass down to the dirt, Chris just wheels it to a fresh corner of the yard.

Chris Bajuk’s coop on wheels

This mobility is key, as Chris is a renter and got his landlord’s permission for the coop on the condition that he could pack it up when he moved. A renter! My eyes went starry. I’d assumed that the dream of chicken ownership was out of reach for me until I had my own land (or at the very least, enough cash to afford a classy, sage-colored coop, but now…

“Hey, do you think our building would let us keep chickens in the side yard?” I asked my boyfriend, Ted, when I got home.

“No,” he replied.

“But what if we built a mobile coop? It’s only about the size of a doghouse,” I said. A doghouse big enough for Cujo, I added to myself, but still.

“We don’t have a fence—what if someone wheels our chickens off?” Ted said. Chicken theft–I hadn’t thought of that.

Regardless, I’d learned a valuable lesson: You don’t need that much space to house chickens.

The other setups I saw on the coop tour featured more elaborate, permanent structures. They ranged from the prefab habitations (a store-bought coop built to resemble a mini barn, inside a reinforced dog kennel-turned-chicken run) to the specialized, it-took-me-six-months-to-design-it variety (roomy and raised, with a poop-through mesh floor for easy cleaning). Jennifer Keeler’s tall chicken shed in particular caught my eye. Streamlined and airy, it looked like something out of a Pottery Barn catalog (in reality, Jennifer’s husband built it).

Jennifer Keeler’s killer coop

Two golden hens pecked peacefully at the lawn while we looked around, unconcerned about the equally free-range family dog. A couple of young pullets were confined to a mini-coop across the yard — for their own protection, Jennifer assured us, as adult hens viciously maintain the — ha! — pecking order. A fifth hen peeked out from behind the back door, quarantined because she was suffering from a bout of poultry wheezes.

The coop was part chicken house, part love shack. “We’ve bonded with them,” Jennifer said, describing tranquil backyard moments spent with both hens maneuvering for position in her lap. Her young son informed us that “We’re not going to eat them,” and of course not. Anyone could see these hens were a part of the family (the part that provides farm-fresh breakfasts, which gives them a leg up on at least 60 percent of my relatives).

I’d learned another vital lesson. As John Lennon might say, when it comes to chicken rearing, in the end, the eggs you take are equal to the love you make.

As impressive as all these coops were (and I only saw a fraction of the 58 yards on the tour), all paled in comparison to the urban-farm fairyland run by Ingela Wanerstrand. Behind her ordinary-looking house lie a chicken coop with an edible-garden roof, a beehive, a glorious vegetable garden, and a goat yard with three pudgy little goats. “Making chevre is ridiculously easy,” Ingela was saying as I approached the paddock. I want your life, I thought. And I want your fine cheeses even more.

Who you callin’ chicken?

Patience, patience. I’d learned my final lesson: Dream bigger. Backyard chickens are just the beginning. Why stop there when it’s possible to set up an entire backyard farm? (No kidding: In Seattle, you can even keep cows and sheep if you have enough space.) I’m no prepper, but if the dreaded meltdown of society ever does come upon us, I’m heading straight over there. We’d be safe — the woman has bees, people.

I may not be able to realize my dream of a backyard chicken coop just yet, but I left the tour more hopeful than ever. The hosts had shown me that chicken husbandry was easier than I imagined, even for a newbie like me. In the meantime, I’ll be mentally designing my ideal coop and studying up on the difference between a Buff Orpington and a Black Australorp. Oh, and I’m making myself totally available for chicken-sitting to any local farmers in need. All I ask in return is an egg or two (but I wouldn’t turn down a pat of homemade chevre).

Filed under: Urban Agriculture

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